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If our dark cyber-future lets you experience life through the eyes of a chicken, then so be it. If our dark cyber-future lets a chicken experience life through the eyes of man, has science gone too far? This episode best experienced with at least one sense augmented through technology, and one sense disabled to compensate. With special guest Zack Johnson, co-creator of the Kingdom of Loathing and host of the Video Games Hot Dog podcast.

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you don't really need to have abstract shapes for AR tracker, AR libraries can now detect 'normal' images.

actually, if you're just going to integrate simulated stuff over reality, without these virtual object having a 'real world' object counterpart, you don't even need any special pattern or grid to provide the simulation with a reference of what sort of perspective the camera is looking at. PTAM sort of solved that a few years back rather impressively (the creator went on to work at Microsoft, never to be seen again; just like Johnny 'Wiimote hack' Lee)

AR has great wayof feeding off from other technologies; like Kinect (or any system able to create depthmap) - it leads to proper occlusion of virtual vs real, relighting of the real environment by virtual lightsources and (possibly) doing physics with the real space (grenade rolling down a tea table).

I don't know how CastAR deals with occlusion by the way.

RFID would probably be useful in the case of having elements being moved out of any of the players view and still wanting the game logic/simulation to acknowledge it. (stupid example: somebody moves a warrior next to a target, the simulation should start a fight even though none of it is visible to the players).

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Zack's thoughts on Cookie Clicker are dead on. It's so often referred to as a game like Candy Box and it's not. I played it for hours and was so disappointed. The joy of Candy Box -- what the heck IS this game -- isn't there at all! That game really is just about about clicking upgrades and watching your cookie numbers go up. It has charming humor and artwork but otherwise it's only the game Candy Box was pretending to be. Supposedly the author is adding dungeons and so on into Cookie Clicker... but I have a hard time imagining how those could be meaningfully integrated into the rest of the game if they are only being built at this point in development?

For a game that is actually like Candy Box: http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ It's good in the ways Candy Box is good. It's not too long either, you can finish in about two full days of leaving the browser tab open and playing once in awhile.

Edit: Wrote this while listening to the podcast and this was mentioned almost exactly as I finished typing. lol

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I was so glad that Chris talked about The Smash Brothers. Last week I had a bunch of stupid coding to churn through, so I went and watched the documentary in the background while I worked, and I really want to hear human beings discuss this. I WANT TO DISCUSS IT. Like, as with many podcasts, there are just moments where I YEARN to just speak up and take a conversation in an interesting way.

I could never wrap my head around super high level Smash Bros. play, but damn if I didn't play a lot of it. I can't believe how much was going on just over the last ten years. You'd of course hear about "wavedashing," and when you're at college, there'd always be one person who is light years ahead, but I really love that there just these humans for whom the only competition they could ever have is with each other. There's a

, and it's absurd! And to think there are people where that's just how they play the game that, as Chris and the documentary mentioned, was NEVER INTENDED to be played in this way!

The other two things that really drew me into the series were:

1) There are a lot of weirdos in the world. The documentary does a good job kind of taking a step back from their weirdo lives, but every once in a while you suddenly take a look at the strange settings where the interviews are being done, and you're like: "wait, what?" There's one person being interviewed, and throughout the interview, there's this anonymous person in short shorts just lounging reading a book on a mattress on the floor. It's as if we're interviewing someone who is in a safe house.

2) The typical joke (that Jake makes, actually, in the episode) about high-level Smash play being "Fox only, no items, final destination" arises, but is never really directly addressed in the series, but what is interesting is watching how certain characters become the only ones people play. It seems that the game revolves around a triangle of Marth / Fox / Falco, but the series also highlights individual players who are great at Peach, Captain Falcon, and Jigglypuff. I remember from this year's Evo competition that one character got pretty far with the Ice Climbers, so there's at least seven characters who are played at the tournament level. Also, it's really fascinating that it's not always Final Destination, but that there is actually TOURNAMENT PLAY on the F-Zero level with the cars flying everywhere. They even show some early tournament play on real crazy levels, like Rainbow Cruise.

SO. OVERALL. If you have some time and want to watch a weird series where a bunch of (mostly male) people make super broad, super hyperbolic statements about other (male) nerds, this is definitely for you.

(Oh, and my only disappointment is that they address the incredibly offensive fighting game usage of "rape" with like, a five minute segment later in the series that mostly sweeps it under the rug. Come on, everyone, let's not use that word)

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Oh man, Adventure Quest. I played so much of that in high school. The amount of attention it demanded was just enough that I could be IMing or doing homework and just slowly chip through some monsters. A distraction in the purest sense, and one that didn't actually impede anything you wanted to do. It was really interesting to see it evolve. New mechanics and abilities were being bolted on every so often. Then they did another game where it had more movement around a map. Then they did a sci-fi game about mechs. And then I think they did one where you can be a dragon person*, and that's the last thing I saw, long after I had ever played any of their games.

*There's a lot of dragons and dragon-esque creatures in their games.

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A lot of cool stuff discussed in this episode. I liked that it opened up with early internet-era talk as I was just reminiscing about using Gopher protocol in the early 90's to find tips about how to play video games.

The CastAR stuff is also way more exciting to me than the Oculus Rift. It seems like the sort of thing that has a lot of potential to create some really cool hybrid between video games and board games, and that is way more exciting to me than the idea of virtual reality. Basically I find the idea of interesting new game play mechanics more exciting than the idea of feeling like "I'm really there".

I'm glad Delver was mentioned, I hadn't heard of it, but it looks cool so I will probably check it out at some point (probably after I pick up Nuclear Throne, which also looks amazing). As far as Eldritch's aesthetic goes, I feel like that's a choice out of necessity for the type of game that was being designed. It bums me out to see a lot of people complain about that because the game does get so many different things right, like the controls are amazing. I agree with Zack's criticism that it could be a better game with more equipment and a few more systems in place so I really do hope they roll some sort of expansion or something like that at some point.

Also I totally feel where Chris is coming from when he talks about the frustration of having a harder time getting enthusiastic about music. And it is partly about because it it is much easier to look stuff up instantly, and so you no longer have that sense of anticipation that used to exist, but of course that isn't entirely it. Like one of the most exciting moments I've had in terms of experiencing new music in a recorded format in the last year or so was a friend directing me to this youtube video of this band from Thailand (maybe?) playing at a wedding (I think?) and it is this just totally nuts psychedelic music. (For reference, it is this:

) That's something I couldn't have reasonably found on my own because I don't even understand the character script and language that you would use to search for something like that, and on top of that I don't have the cultural knowledge to even comprehend this thing that I then just witness. And that right there is the power and allure of discovering new music, that feeling where you are confronted with something unfamiliar and your sense of what is possible in the world just explodes and opens right up. It's a rush and really exciting, and people get really into books, music, movies, video games, whatever else chasing that feeling. So as Jake says, part of it is just getting old too, and a greater amount of the world is more familiar to you than when you were younger. Also, personally for me, I've found specifically with music that living in San Francisco, which is something I mostly enjoy, is kind of frustrating in terms of being able to seek out cool stuff happening musically just because of how expensive property is here, you don't see a lot of spaces and opportunities conducive to the formation of an interesting music community because most music isn't profitable enough to really be sustainable here. That's not to say there aren't any cool things happening, but it does create a whole feeling of musicians being a dying breed, which drains my enthusiasm to seek it out.

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I haven't finished this episode yet, but it occurred to me to wonder, if Jake followed through on every suicide threat he's made over the years on Idle Thumbs, how many lives has he lost? I think it must be at least one hundred.

As mentioned later on the 'cast, "Superman" stories still abound, even without the license. In fact, there's very little about the Superman character that cannot be appropriated into a non-licensed property and still recognized as such. Really, the only thing that is protected are the names and likeness.

In that regard, we're probably lucky that our corporate overlords are Disney, who are singularly unimaginative in what they protect. As you noted, Mickey Mouse is nothing but likeness: he doesn't have any distinguishing characteristics aside from image, instead simply taking whatever form the current story required. As a result, that's all that Disney sought to protect. If DC comics / Superman had been the ones leading the IP charge, I suspect that things could have turned out much worse for other creators.

I'm also not sure that I follow Chris's point about how limiting access to these properties limits the ability of good (fan-based) work to get recognized. In the marketplace, it's still going to be virtually impossible to break through into the popular consciousness, perhaps even moreso if you're competing with other creators in a literally undifferentiated marketplace.

I also don't know that I agree that such works that become shared cultural touchstones won't ever be available again. The power of Superman is his mythic quality: that's why he recognizably survives so many variations. There isn't a similar list of variations on Spiderman's mythology (Invincible, kinda-maybe?). Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Lovecraft, all these have a certain amount of mythic power. Very few works have the right factors to become integrated into the modern popular culture in this way, so the problem with the modern world may not be that the IP laws prevent it, it may simply be that we're too interested in eating our own tail (remakes, etc) and less so in creating work, and besides, as per the good old Sturgeon's Law, a recent dearth doesn't necessarily mean that anything has changed. Those kinds of works probably only come along once a generation or so anyways, even in perfect conditions.

The recent prominence of the zombie mythos is a perfect refutation of your argument. Zombies are a recent invention, but they aren't "owned" by George Romero, or The Walking Dead, or anybody else. It's still possible to create shared cultural touchstones even given the current state of IP law, you just need an idea that's powerful enough (and versatile enough) to support it.

Uh, also, since we're talking about unlicensed variations and Sherlock Holmes, I feel a responsibility to mention Ruse,

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Interesting stuff, Wheeljack. I wonder how much more our society will continue down this path where such a huge, huge amount of cultural effort is put into creative derivative works (fan fiction / cosplay / deviant art images of characters from tv shows and movies and comics, etc). We also have a lot of machinery in place to reward this, which tends to continue to propagate its creation (see: the rise of the nerd news aggregator site). You are right, in that just because IP laws are still in place preventing someone from straight-up using Superman / Batman / Mickey Mouse doesn't stop people from using the concept in a thinly veiled way, but I wonder why people have to do this to begin with? Is it just that the act of creating something New, and without previous referents, is far more difficult than heading down an already beaten path? I just tend to see the universe as being so stupidly full of possibility that making yet another "here is what the cast of Popular Television Show would look like as anime characters / lego minifigs / 8 bit video game sprites" seems like a waste of someone's impressive talents. (I think that this is a tangent based on what you were saying, but it's something I've thought about)

(Also, thanks whoever asked about "bespoke," since I heard it a lot on the cast, and never, until the question was asked, thought that it had any specific meaning in games)

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That smash doc is great! But I too wish it spent more than a glancing thought about some of the more unfortunate aspects of the subculture (and all American fighting game subcultures). More than that, though, I wish the doc wasn't so horrible when depicting Japan or Japanese players... whenever anything about Japan comes up the doc goes from quite interesting to almost unwatchable.

I mean, Girls Generation? Seriously? Guys. Come on.

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That smash doc is great! But I too wish it spent more than a glancing thought about some of the more unfortunate aspects of the subculture (and all American fighting game subcultures). More than that, though, I wish the doc wasn't so horrible when depicting Japan or Japanese players... whenever anything about Japan comes up the doc goes from quite interesting to almost unwatchable.

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Interesting podcast, guys! I'd have loved to learn a little more about the background of Kingdom of Loathing and how it developed. There seems to be an interesting story behind that, that's now only hinted at. Maybe a good candidate for Tone Control?

Also, I'd like to see Jake with a Corvo mask on.

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My bad, I thought you were bagging on its existence, not on its inclusion.

EDIT: Actually on topic, I just finished listening to the tangent on the implications of intellectual property. Unsurprisingly, as an academic, I'm in agreement with Chris here. I'll even take it one step further: by tying the most salient aspects of a given character or work to a corporation, current copyright law ensures that the inevitable derivative works enrich the corporation, either with money or fame, rather than the character, the creator, or the culture.

I'm a strict believer in "lifetime of the creator" limits, but that's mostly because my dissertation hinges on a book from 1926 that can't be reprinted or reproduced because it was composed and published by entities that ceased to exist after the outbreak of the Second World War.

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This I don't understand. Why the +50 years? What good would that do to the original creator?

Of course, things get incredibly muddy when you consider that a huge amount of content gets created by teams, working within corporations or funded by them. 'Lifetimes' don't hold up then. Perhaps a set amount of years would be better. Say, 50? 50 is an incredible amount of years to reap the benefits off of anything.